informed. The makeup and the typog- raphy are inviting. The editors have made available a number of passages not previously in reach of the general reader. In short, "Selected Letters of Richard Wagner" (Norton; $35) is a feast. Some may want to read consecu- tively, arriving at a conspectus from within of Wagner's prodigious career, a progress that led from destitution and revolutionary fervor to a measure of sanctification never before accorded an artist in his lifetime. Others may prefer to follow through a given set of ex- changes, with Nietzsche, with the Wesendoncks, with royal Ludwig. Us- ing the excellent index, one can trace the composition and fortunes of this or that work-of the "Ring," for in- stance. The letters allow us to observe the immense cycle from its inception, in 1848, to its completion, in 1874, though the documentation still leaves scarcely plausible the inner coherence of a design, of a philosophic-musical act of begetting which, despite long interruptions and radical changes within Wagner himself, kept its mo- mentum, its secret sinews of continuity, across twenty-six years. Y et another approach to this collection is to adopt the Wagnerian concept of the leitmo- tiv, and trace an intellectual theme, a personal obsession, a public or private sequence in Wagner's sensibility and life history. This is a particularly en- lightening way of reading, because Wagner's personal relations, as these letters express them, are inseparable from issues of intellectual polemic as well as of creation. F INE-COMBED as it has been in a dozen monographs and more gen- eral studies, Wagner's long intimacy with Franz Liszt still does not yield all its intensities and convolutions. The Liszt whom the young Wagner meets in Paris in the late autumn of 1840 and to whom he writes in March, 1841, IS a European force whose patronage, whose eventual commendation of a budding composer-conductor, will prove decisive. It is Liszt who will, with a characteristic acuity of recogni- tion and characteristic generosity, be among the very first to recognize Wagner's genius. It is he who will seek to produce the operas and perform the music of Wagner in Germany dur- ing the composer's lengthy exile after 1849. It is Liszt's transcriptions for piano which will gradually make the "new music" available to alert ears. Wagner's attitudes are, almost from the first, ambiguous. Undoubtedly, he registered Liszt's genius as a virtuoso, as an impresario, and, within a certain range, pianistic and choral, as a com- poser. He knew and often responded with genuine enthusiasm to the great- heartedness of his protector and publi- cist. Had they not, in an hour of pecu- liar desolation for Wagner, exchanged a literal kiss on the lips, in the very image of the Christology that so deeply animated Liszt's faith and works? But there was too much in Liszt's mun- dani ty, in his immense success, and in his music that repelled Wagner. Wagner could not help seeing himself as the savior of art, of German nation- hood-as the only true apostolic heir to Beethoven. Precisely this vision en- tailed the notion of Liszt as either a St. John the Baptist, prIvileged to pro- claim and serve a greater coming, or, potentially, a Judas (that kiss). It was during the winter of 1858-59 that the cracks opened. Liszt had, it IS true, rhapsodized over the marvels of the first act of "Tristan," which he had just received. He was, no doubt, striving with all his generous influence to have Wagner's early opera "Rienzi" staged in Weimar. But he ventured to reproach Wagner for the opulence of his life style: he had bridled, however gently, at the incessant cries for money. Wagner's riposte, on December 31, 1858, is still robustly good-natured: My Franz, when you see the second act of Tristan, you'll admit that I need a lot of money. I'm a great spend-thrift; but, really, it does produce results.- Y ou know that. But just think about it. . . . All that I need from the world IS money: apart from that I have everything.-It is you and your delight in the 1st act of Tristan that are to blame for this fit of high spirits on my part. When you get to know the second act, /4? 105 you'll even be able to forgive me for doing nothIng today except to shout out for- money! Money!-How and from whom doesn't matter. Tristan will repay it all! But only a week later the tone turns ugly. Liszt's wealth, the ease with which his works are produced exasper- ate Wagner. Liszt is no longer capable of putting himself in Wagner's position "with enough understand- ing." He is still the "strange and dear, dear friend!," but a deep unease sur- faces. It will, of course, be aggravated by Wagner's liaison, so public, so du- plicitous in respect of von Bülow, with Liszt's daughter, Cosima. Wagner's letter to Countess Marie d' Agoult, Liszt's companion and Cosima's mother, in August, 1870, three days before his marriage to Cosima (she had been living with Wagner, on and off, for years), is among the most canting feline, and ostentatiously overblown ever penned by a great spirit. The rela- tionship was-professionally, at least -mended. Liszt did not attend the foundation ceremonies at Bayreuth or the first "Ring," of 1876. But he remained loyal to a genius surpassing even his own, and the piano piece he wrote in premonition of Wagner's death, in Venice, is one of the most haunting, most concentrated valedic- tions one master creator has ever be- stowed upon another. The irruption of young Professor Friedrich Nietzsche, of the University of Basel, into Wagner and Cosima's life in May, 1869, produced stellar hours for both men. Overwhelmed by Schopenhauer's philosophy of music as pure will and by Schopenhauer's ideal of ultimate, transfigurative renuncia- tion of the world, Wagner found in Nietzsche a long-awaited spiritual son. Nietzsche had published hardly any- thing but a handful of philological papers. N evertheless, Wagner at once sensed the incandescent brilliance, the visionary audacity in his visitor. Nietz- sche's "Socrates and Tragedy" excited him profoundly. In "The Birth of Tragedy" Wagner found not only an epochal originality but the setting out of a radicalized Wagnerian ideal of Dionysian-tragic art and of the re- demption of culture through music. Nietzsche made no fewer than twenty- three visits to Tribschen, Wagner and Cosima's dream refuge on the shore of Lake Lucerne. Here the Bayreuth project-the goal of re-creating a playhouse, an audience, an aesthetic-